Glottic Stop

May 19 2011

You could drown in a glass of water

some know-it-all said

in grade school.

Mere seconds, and you’re dead,

pulling my leg, for sure.

But after that

I could never drink from a glass

without thoughts of mortality.

The glottic stop,

the flap of frail tissue

that keeps me breathing

without needing to think.

And  seems to catch in my throat

when I do.

I heard about a chunk of rock

that killed a cow in a farmer’s field.

A meteorite, pitted black

surface, turned to glass

by heat,

coming a million miles

to land, by chance.

After that

I found it hard to trust the sky,

raining down lightning bolts

hail the size of golf balls.

The oncoming driver,

whose heavy eyes

closed a second longer,

watching the broken line

tick by

like a hypnotist’s clock.

And swerved

over the thin white divider

after just passing me by.

At 60 miles an hour

a-mile-a-minute,

when a single second

means 88 feet.

Not enough time

for your mouth to go dry

before swallowing

hard.

A believer would call these acts of God,

an atheist

contingencies.

That separate us by less than a second

from blind intersections,

the dumb luck

that comes at us

head-on.

I tried using straws

sucking on ice.

Never walking or talking

when I sipped my coffee,

or quaffed

a long tall cool one.

Which reminds me of the daredevil

on his high tower

looking down,

about to dive into a small pail of water.

Who bails out

descending the ladder, instead,

misses a step

and tumbles backwards,

straight down

into hard unyielding ground.

A second

that must have felt like hours.

An odd poem, that must seem both neurotic and morbid. And certainly something I’ve written about before:  the idea of contingency, blind fate, near misses; everything from accidents of birth, to birds flying into car windows. But it was fun to write, and that alone is enough.

I’m not sure where this began, where this idea of “drowning in a glass of water” came from. Perhaps I was thinking of all the out-dated shibboleths and finger-wagging parental warnings; especially in an era of over-cautious child-rearing, not to mention generalized anxiety.  Neither am I sure where the meteorite or high diver came from. But for whatever reason, both were irresistible images, and I went with them. So I hope it’s not fatally incoherent. Maybe when I re-visit this later, I’ll be in a better position to judge.

Luckily, we’re all very accomplished at denial, at drifting through daily life with our illusion of invulnerability – if not immortality – fully intact.  Otherwise, life would be so fraught it wouldn’t seem worth carrying on!

I, of course, am the atheist in this poem. Not the most comforting world view, but it’s mine nevertheless:  that we are the result of the random intersection of molecules in a cold indifferent universe, and neither illusions of agency, nor illusions of God, will protect us.